Sarah Holbrook

The Retail Outlook? Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

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Stanford professor and author of the bestseller Mindset, Carol Dweck describes grading students as a young teacher. If a student was not progressing toward the expected learning outcome, rather than a failing grade, the mark given was a not yet. Holiday shopping is now underway, and 2021 fast approaches, are the signs for retail signaling recovery, or are they indicating not yet? Divergent Outlooks Green shoots have appeared. Goldman Sachs has raised its 2021 GDP forecast to 6.2 percent from 5.6 in anticipation of broad vaccine distribution …

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Fashion Moves Out of This World

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The pandemic continues to unravel both our social lives and social fabric, but changes are not limited to the corporeal; our social media lives are changing too. Gaming has become global, communal and interactive. An August 2020 eMarketer survey pegs the number of digital gamers in the United States at 174.7 million or 52.5 percent of the population. Amazon just introduced a gaming platform called Luna which will stream more than 100 popular video games and will integrate with Amazon-owned Twitch, the live-stream gaming platform. Stastia breaks …

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The Indefatigable Walmart Gets a Piece of TikTok

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In the game of musical chairs that has been the TikTok acquisition, Walmart and Oracle are still seated as the music stops although they may on be stools, make that stools with a leg missing. Walmart has hung in there after first dancing with Google, then Microsoft, and now Oracle, but with each change of partner, the jackpot Walmart was reaching for diminished in value. Tik Tok posted on Twitter that “Oracle will serve as a trusted tech partner responsible for hosting all US server data”. The Tweet continued, “We are currently working with …

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The Quarantine Data Dearth

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My shopping patterns have changed, have yours? Nozzle, a British consultancy that specializes in Amazon sales optimization released a report on recent Amazon search trend results. The insights reveal the top search terms. The lead searches for June in the U.S. were: Facemasks Lysol wipes Reusable facemasks Other popular items in the top ten include hand sanitizer and desk chairs.  The July numbers were broken down differently, but the top two items were identical to June. Our consumer behavior has been flipped on its head. This …

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“Wanna Chat…With A Brand?

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Let’s shift our gaze from the current moment where an undercurrent of uncertainty colors everything. It is easy to feel like we are treading water both professionally and personally, but if we look outward, things are changing at a rapid pace. As I have heard repeatedly in recent weeks, this pandemic has accelerated shifts that were already underway and/or, a decade’s worth of change has rained down on our society in fewer than six months. One area where this is especially true is the integration of voice-activated smart speakers into our …

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Facebook Shops Is a Winner – but for Whom?

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In a recent Facebook live stream, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s latest foray into e-commerce retail. Zuckerberg described Shops as, “The biggest step we have taken yet [in social commerce].”  This time Facebook is playing for keeps. Origin Story In August 2019, Facebook pulled rank on its two highly coveted holdings, Instagram and WhatsApp. The tech community howled about brand dilution of the wildly popular apps, and Instagram devotees held their collective noses when the titles of the apps were changed to Instagram from Facebook and …

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The Great Reopening?

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The great American closing was straightforward. Stores, restaurants, and the bulk of the economy switched to sleep mode; waking up will be a different matter. The shape of this phase of post-Covid retail is now unfolding. Other countries are well into the reopening and offer us models to consider. Additionally, innovators, driven by opportunity and a problem-solving culture have been rushing potential solutions to market.  And finally, for VR, an existing technology that has been awaiting wide-spread adoption, the moment may have …

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We Like Big Tech Again

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We are all living in a time warp as our collective confinement continues, but let’s reminisce back to Q1 2020.  In January, California residents gained the right to wrestle back their user data from the tech platforms, retailers, and any other companies that had captured and exploited it. In February, Senator Josh Hawley posited that the FTC take over Google, and Senator Amy Klobuchar introduced an antitrust modernization bill as a cudgel against big tech. The country was speeding toward a new era where the big technology companies would be …

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